Value extraction is breaking our Tower of Babel
Platforms are shaping our language and fragmenting our ability to communicate.
Remember when your parents texted you their first lol, brb, or some unique acronym that didn’t make sense? I’m speaking as an older millennial, but this applies to anyone that grew up with a technology that went mainstream.
Why does it feel weird to communicate with someone from a different generation using “your” language?
Tangible technologies shaping the way we communicate make sense. The telegraph rewarded a clipped writing style due to several constraints. Pager users evolved an even shorter writing style. Early cell phone users evolved into writing in acronyms like LOL, G2G, and BRB because it was far faster and easier.
Some of these shortened styles have transcended their tech beginnings to become a part of our lexicon. SOS is perfect and can’t be improved. It stands for ‘save our souls’ but it’s universally known as a help signal. It’s short, to the point, and hard to misinterpret even in Morse code: o o o — — — o o o. LOL is just as much a part of our everyday language as cool or tubular (maybe not tubular… just checking to see if you are reading closely).
Despite all these technology-driven changes, we found our way back to natural language somewhere around the early 2000s. The full keyboards of the Blackberry and iPhone, paired with capable speech-to-text features, largely put an end to this style of shortened communication. There was a period between 2000 and 2010 when communication felt less coded and more straightforward than it is now. Then came Big Data and monetization.
Laying the tower’s foundation
Facebook was a big deal. I’ll save you the long-winded recap, but what began as something exclusive to college students slowly expanded to include everyone else. It was a genius technique that capitalized on what drives much of the economy: FOMO. It started at the Ivy League before expanding to other universities and Facebook rode this wave perfectly until every market was tapped and you started receiving friend requests from family members you would prefer didn’t see how you were partying.
Every entrepreneur was watching and learning how to capitalize on this approach. Since Facebook rose to its prominence, the world has seen countless iterations on social media all vying for the same prize: more.
More eyes. More time. More engagement. Grow to include everyone in the world — a modern tower to the heavens.
The explicit goal of social media is to attain the largest number of users possible to communicate easier. What did Facebook do after it tapped out the American experience? They expanded internationally toward their goal of ubiquity.
The linguistic harmony of 2005–2015
Despite wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a time somewhere between 2005–2015 when it felt like we were progressing as a species. Facebook grew explosively, new ways to express thoughts came about through services like Vine and Instagram, and people were finding genuine connections across the world with ease.
Streaming services and the internet seemed like they were killing cable. Advertising, that time stolen from your life, seemed to be losing its footing in culture and media.
The Arab Spring demonstrated just how much we were changing as a species. Twitter fueled this movement like and the world saw people championing their revolutionary causes in real time from every continent. Even though this was a time of turmoil, change was in the air. Freedom. The shackles of despots and tyranny were weakened because people could communicate in real time.
Change was in the air. Progress was made daily. The tower grew taller.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the shift. Was it cultural or bureaucratic? Somewhere around 2015, everything seemed to shift toward the modern structure of the internet.
Value extraction starts to undo everything
The story of the Tower of Babel doesn’t have a happy ending. God (Yahweh in this story) looked down to see the tower growing too tall, threatening his position of power. A shared language was the engine that allowed the people to grow stronger so Yahweh ‘confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.’
Around 2015 many things were coming together at the same time. I’m going to focus on Facebook and Instagram because they are well known but this value extraction process is mimicked by nearly every digital company in the 2020s.
Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion. By 2015 Instagram was up to 400 million monthly active users. 2016 is when everything started to race toward value extraction. Ads were introduced. Stories were introduced. Live streaming was introduced. Growth didn’t slow down but the experience was starting to change.
The concept of spending your time as an influencer started shifting from a side hustle to a way to make real money. The benevolence of sharing ideas and art gave way to people trying to game the system for personal gain.
By 2017, Instagram was still growing aggressively but the algorithm started to shape how people communicate. Change your style to match what Instagram is pushing and you will be rewarded. Stay true to yourself and watch your hard work reach fewer and fewer people. I’m not talking about content, I’m talking about mode. The following metrics are essential to understanding how people use technology but placing significant weight on them influences the way people communicate.
Engagement: a way to measure virality. This rewards genuine content but this gave rise to shitposting. Likes, dislikes, forwards, reposting, etc. Using any emotional response as a metric doesn’t lead to nuanced understanding, it leads to playground antics and division.
Time: measuring just how long someone leaves a post on their device or the age of a post. This metric encourages people to produce more content, constantly. To be rewarded with an audience, you need to post content frequently. You need to keep your mind thinking about the platform to keep producing content.
Location: where a post was made. This can help reach a local audience but this is yet another tool to be exploited. It’s absurdly easy to make a post that claims you are in Singapore, Vancouver, or New York City. For a content creator, this helps reach more people but it is training your mind to be deceitful. If you are in that location, so be it, but if you aren’t there it is just one more way to exploit FOMO on a personal level.
The scattered people: our diverging vernacular
Language evolves just like anything else in nature. You need to look no further than any work of Shakespeare to recognize just how much the same language can evolve in a relatively short amount of time. Evolution is reactive, not proactive. If you change stimuli to an organism for long enough, adaptations occur to help the individual and, if these changes prove to be beneficial, they will be conserved and passed down.
If this adaptation is rewarded with increased prosperity on a long enough timeline, a species can diverge. A little divergence and you get a change in language, behavior, or physical attributes. Prolonged divergence can lead to speciation — evolving a new species. I’m not warning that we are headed toward a donkey/horse situation, but the culture that binds us together is experiencing pressures that I believe originate in a diverging language.
Social media platforms, these silos of communication, are all trying to grow and they reward users that buy into the style of communication they desire. The goal isn’t good or bad, it is quantification. You probably know someone that has given up their autonomy, their way of thinking, over to a platform that rewards a particular style of communicating. How many people do you know that talk and think in the style of their favorite platform?
LinkedIn pushes motivational language that is meant to encourage others to seize the day and often comes wrapped in humble-bragging or waxing poetically about an obscure observation. Here is one of many style guides for LinkedIn.
Instagram is going through a bit of an identity crisis (reels and TikTok), but its engine runs on creature comforts like sexualized content or food, FOMO, and direct requests for engagement (polls, sharing to stories, etc). Here is one of many style guides for IG.
Facebook is a bit unique. You can find the front page for a store or brand, nuanced and long-form content, or pure garbage. The people you follow largely dictate what kind of content you will see which can create idealogical eddy currents. Nevertheless, here is a style guide for Facebook.
Medium feels like it is on the right track despite all the articles about how it’s broken. The listicles exploit a part of our brain that is so powerful you can find countless articles from writers feeling compelled to write in this style (this applies to YouTube as well). Here is one of MANY style guides for Medium.
Twitter encourages short and current writing. For a nuanced subject, this is impossible. Being ‘always on’ and communicating in the short form forces people to pursue a steady stream of dopamine hits instead of letting an idea marinate. Here is a style guide for Twitter posts.
Where is this all headed?
The only thing that never changes is change. That saying and its derivatives can be attributed to many different people. We are experiencing an evolution of nature on a timescale that allows us to see it happening. Normally evolution requires generations to observe subtle change but language and culture can change within a lifetime. In the age of the internet, this evolution occurs much faster.
I’m far from a Luddite but this change in language poses some significant challenges to the social order. Culture is the sharing of ideas. What happens to a culture when the delivery mechanism to share those ideas starts to diverge? We aren’t talking about different spoken languages with grammatical rules, we are talking about dissolving the rules themselves.
Now for my direct participation in this platform-shaped way of thinking and communicating: if you have any thoughts on this topic, please add a comment, engage, and bump that algorithm that measures the ideas being exchanged.
